August 8, 2024 : Wondercab Mini (73A)

Another double feature from the AV Room:

1) The observances around James Baldwin’s hundredth birthday last week, as I recalled at the end our last issue, put me back in mind of the commemorative events I helped to curate on behalf of Bill T Jones’s Live Ideas Festival ten years ago, devoted to Baldwin on the occasion of what would then have been his ninetieth year. In the days since I took to thinking about an especially remarkable half-hour five-screen braided video fugue of a piece about Baldwin—and specifically the extraordinary quality of his voice, its timbre and its authority and its persistent salience—that we commissioned at the time from the eminent artist-activist Hank Willis Thomas. And to my delight, I was able to determine that the piece can still be accessed, after a fashion (and definitely with regard to continuing piercing vividness of that voice!) by way of a Vimeo link, which I heartily commend to you here.

Incidentally, speaking of braidings, I notice how just yesterday Hank Willis Thomas issued his own Paris-Olympics-timed limited-edition lithograph commemorating the great Jesse Owens’s triumph at the 1936 Berlin games, subject of our own issue 72A. 

Glosses Thomas:

The Iconic American Sprinter and Long Jumper Jesse Owens died just a few days after my 4th birthday. I remember being upstairs in my grandmother's house when the news came on the black-and-white television. I remember hearing the adults talk about him with such pride and reverence. I remember them saying, “He had big eyes just like you.” It also stood out because they were talking positively about a Black man on the news. One might say this was the beginning of my political awareness. It was so uncommon for a Black man to be revered on the news that it imprinted deeply in my mind, that there were Black American heroes. I didn't yet understand what he did in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, and how it reshaped the discourse around sports and politics and opened infinite doors of opportunity for billions of people around the world. I did understand that he could run and so could I! It is no wonder that I continue to return to sports as a way to talk about the universal struggle for freedom and human rights. 

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2) Meanwhile from the proverbial sublime to the patently ridiculous: I was alerted (by way once again of my Australian cousin Nicholas Gruen’s positively brimming weekly aggregator Substack) to the existence of a terrific fifteen-minute radio interview that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation recently coaxed out of magician-provocateur Penn Jillette, the speaking half of the legendary Penn and Teller duo, on the occasion of their coming tour of the island continent (for indeed, almost fifty years on, they are still at it, perpetrating their exquisitely sly subversions).  The whole thing is well worth catching, but especially this three-minute passage where Jillette recalls the days when he was working with Donald Trump as a contestant on the latter’s Apprentice show, what he made of him then and what he makes of him now—estimations well worth your consideration.

See you next week!